ABSTRACT
Our study of prison life began, then, with an average group of healthy, intelligent, middle-class males. These boys were arbitrarily divided into two groups by a flip of the coin. Half were randomly assigned to be guards, the other to be prisoners. It is important to remember that at the beginning of our experiment there were no differences between boys assigned to be a prisoner and boys assigned to be a guard…. There were three types of guards. First, there were tough but fair guards who followed prison rules. Second, there were ‘good guys’ who did little favors for the prisoners and never punished them. And finally, about a third of the guards were hostile, arbitrary, and inventive in their forms of prisoner humiliation. These guards appeared to thoroughly enjoy the power they wielded, yet none of our preliminary personality tests were able to predict this behavior…. I ended the study prematurely for two reasons. First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was ‘off’. Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners. Second, Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other’s shoulders. Filled with outrage, she said, ‘It’s terrible what you are doing to these boys!’ Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality. Once she countered the
power of the situation, however, it became clear that the study should be ended. And so, after only six days, our planned two-week prison simulation was called off. (quoted from: https://www.prisonexp.org/; see also The Lucifer Effect. Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Random House, 2007)
In 1971, Phillip Zimbardo, a Professor at Stanford, conducted an experiment that showed the immense power of situational determinants and group processes on behaviour. As described above, the situation turned some ordinary young men into cowed prisoners and cruel prison guards, and the study had to be ended prematurely due to its profound negative effects. The point of the quote as an introduction to the chapter on bar staff is not to compare bar staff to prison guards, although for some security staff the comparison is apt. Rather, the point is to draw attention to the importance of situational demands on behaviour. That is, much of behaviour has to do with how the situation is structured and defined, which is one reason why we draw on the principles of situational crime prevention throughout this book. Situational structures have important implications for how staff behave and for preventing bar violence.
